Leaning from Masters

by Bill Meacham on November 17th, 2016

I recently presented a paper titled “Learning from Masters: Ethics and Cosmology in Zarathustra and Hazrat Inayat Khan” to a conference on Zoroastrianism and Sufism. Zarathustra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, founded the religion that bears his name. Hazrat Inayat Khan is the founder of what is now the Inayati Order of Sufism. In both we find a kind of virtue ethics, a concern for building admirable character rather than obeying moral rules or calculating the consequences of our actions. And in both we find intriguing hints of a cosmology of pantheistic panypsychism.